Ursula K Le Guin

by Buffalo Gals

  Ten of them climbed aboard the ferry at Smeming Port, and made varyingly inept attempts to get to know one another during the three days the ferry took getting to their ship, Gum. Gum is a Cetian nickname, on the order of Baby or Pet. There were two Cetians on the team, two Hainishmen, one Beldene, and five Terrans; the Cetian-built ship was chartered by the Government of Earth. Her motley crew came aboard wriggling through the coupling tube one by one like apprehensive spermatozoa trying to fertilize the universe. The ferry left, and the navigator put Gum underway. She flitted for some hours on the edge of space a few hundred million miles from Smeming Port, and then abruptly vanished.

  When, after 10 hours 29 minutes, or 256 years, Gum reappeared in normal space, she was supposed to be in the vicinity of Star KG-E-96651. Sure enough, there was the gold pinhead of the star. Somewhere within a four-hundred-million-kilometer sphere there was also a greenish planet, World 4470, as charted by a Cetian mapmaker. The ship now had to find the planet. This was not quite so easy as it might sound, given a four-hundred-million-kilometer haystack. And Gum couldn’t bat about in planetary space at near lightspeed; if she did, she and Star KG-E-96651 and World 4470 might all end up going bang. She had to creep, using rocket propulsion, at a few hundred thousand miles an hour. The Mathematician/Navigator, Asnanifoil, knew pretty well where the planet ought to be, and thought they might raise it within ten E-days. Meanwhile the members of the Survey team got to know one another still better.

  “I can’t stand him,” said Porlock, the Hard Scientist (chemistry, plus physics, astronomy, geology, etc.), and little blobs of spittle appeared on his mustache. “The man is insane. I can’t imagine why he was passed as fit to join a Survey team, unless this is a deliberate experiment in noncompatibility, planned by the Authority, with us as guinea pigs.”

  “We generally use hamsters and Hainish gholes,” said Mannon, the Soft Scientist (psychology, plus psychiatry, anthropology, ecology, etc.), politely; he was one of the Hainishmen. “Instead of guinea pigs. Well, you know, Mr. Osden is really a very rare case. In fact, he’s the first fully cured case of Render’s Syndrome—a variety of infantile autism which was thought to be incurable. The great Terran analyst Hammergeld reasoned that the cause of the autistic condition in this case is a supernormal empathic capacity, and developed an appropriate treatment. Mr. Osden is the first patient to undergo that treatment, in fact he lived with Dr. Hammergeld until he was eighteen. The therapy was completely successful.”

  “Successful?”

  “Why, yes. He certainly is not autistic.”

  “No, he’s intolerable!”

  “Well, you see,” said Mannon, gazing mildly at the saliva-flecks on Porlock’s mustache, “the normal defensive-aggressive reaction between strangers meeting—let’s say you and Mr. Osden just for example—is something you’re scarcely aware of; habit, manners, inattention get you past it; you’ve learned to ignore it, to the point where you might even deny it exists. However, Mr. Osden, being an empath, feels it. Feels his feelings, and yours, and is hard put to say which is which. Let’s say that there’s a normal element of hostility towards any stranger in your emotional reaction to him when you meet him, plus a spontaneous dislike of his looks, or clothes, or handshake—it doesn’t matter what. He feels that dislike. As his autistic defense has been unlearned, he resorts to an aggressive-defense mechanism, a response in kind to the aggression which you have unwittingly projected onto him.” Mannon went on for quite a long time.

  “Nothing gives a man the right to be such a bastard,” Porlock said.

  “He can’t tune us out?” asked Harfex, the Biologist, another Hainishman.

  “It’s like hearing” said Olleroo, Assistant Hard Scientist, stooping over to paint her toenails with fluorescent lacquer. “No eyelids on your ears. No Off switch on empathy. He hears our feelings whether he wants to or not.”

  “Does he know what we’re thinking?” asked Eskwana, the Engineer, looking round at the others in real dread.

  “No,” Porlock snapped. “Empathy’s not telepathy! Nobody’s got telepathy.”

  “Yet,” said Mannon, with his little smile. “Just before I left Hain there was a most interesting report in from one of the recently discovered worlds, a hilfer named Rocannon reporting what appears to be a teachable telepathic technique existent among a mutated hominid race; I only saw a synopsis in the HILF Bulletin, but—” He went on. The others had learned that they could talk while Mannon went on talking; he did not seem to mind, nor even to miss much of what they said.

  “Then why does he hate us?” Eskwana said.

  “Nobody hates you, Ander honey,” said Olleroo, daubing Eskwana’s left thumbnail with fluorescent pink. The engineer flushed and smiled vaguely.

  “He acts as if he hated us,” said Haito, the Coordinator. She was a delicate-looking woman of pure Asian descent, with a surprising voice, husky, deep, and soft, like a young bullfrog. “Why, if he suffers from our hostility, does he increase it by constant attacks and insults? I can’t say I think much of Dr. Hammergeld’s cure, really, Mannon; autism might be preferable…”

  She stopped. Osden had come into the main cabin.

  He looked flayed. His skin was unnaturally white and thin, showing the channels of his blood like a faded road map in red and blue. His Adam’s apple, the muscles that circled his mouth, the bones and ligaments of his wrists and hands, all stood out distinctly as if displayed for an anatomy lesson. His hair was pale rust, like long-dried blood. He had eyebrows and lashes, but they were visible only in certain lights; what one saw was the bones of the eye sockets, the veining of the lids, and the colorless eyes. They were not red eyes, for he was not really an albino, but they were not blue or grey; colors had canceled out in Osden’s eyes, leaving a cold water-like clarity, infinitely penetrable. He never looked directly at one. His face lacked expression, like an anatomical drawing, or a skinned face.

  “I agree,” he said in a high, harsh tenor, “that even autistic withdrawal might be preferable to the smog of cheap secondhand emotions with which you people surround me. What are you sweating hate for now, Porlock? Can’t stand the sight of me? Go practice some auto-eroticism the way you were doing last night, it improves your vibes. Who the devil moved my tapes, here? Don’t touch my things, any of you. I won’t have it.”

  “Osden,” said Asnanifoil in his large slow voice, “why are you such a bastard?”

  Ander Eskwana cowered and put his hands in front of his face. Contention frightened him. Olleroo looked up with a vacant yet eager expression, the eternal spectator.

  “Why shouldn’t I be?” said Osden. He was not looking at Asnanifoil, and was keeping physically as far away from all of them as he could in the crowded cabin. “None of you constitute, in yourselves, any reason for my changing my behavior.”

  Harfex, a reserved and patient man, said, “The reason is that we shall be spending several years together. Life will be better for all of us if—”

  “Can’t you understand that I don’t give a damn for all of you?” Osden said, took up his microtapes, and went out. Eskwana had suddenly gone to sleep. Asnanifoil was drawing slipstreams in the air with his finger and muttering the Ritual Primes. “You cannot explain his presence on the team except as a plot on the part of the Terran Authority. I saw this almost at once. This mission is meant to fail,” Harfex whispered to the Coordinator, glancing over his shoulder. Porlock was fumbling with his fly-button; there were tears in his eyes. I did tell you they were all crazy, but you thought I was exaggerating.

  All the same, they were not unjustified. Extreme Surveyors expected to find their fellow team members intelligent, well-trained, unstable, and personally sympathetic. They had to work together in close quarters and nasty places, and could expect one another’s paranoias, depressions, manias, phobias and compulsions to be mild enough to admit of good personal relationships, at least most of the time. Osden might be intelligent, but his training was sketchy and his personality was disastrous. He ha
d been sent only on account of his singular gift, the power of empathy: properly speaking, of wide-range bioempathic receptivity. His talent wasn’t species-specific; he could pick up emotion or sentience from anything that felt. He could share lust with a white rat, pain with a squashed cockroach, and phototropy with a moth. On an alien world, the Authority had decided, it would be useful to know if anything nearby is sentient, and if so, what its feelings towards you are. Osden’s title was a new one: he was the team’s Sensor.

  “What is emotion, Osden?” Haito Tomiko asked him one day in the main cabin, trying to make some rapport with him for once. “What is it, exactly, that you pick up with your empathic sensitivity?”

  “Muck,” the man answered in his high, exasperated voice. “The psychic excreta of the animal kingdom. I wade through your feces.”

  “I was trying,” she said, “to learn some facts.” She thought her tone was admirably calm.

  “You weren’t after facts. You were trying to get at me. With some fear, some curiosity, and a great deal of distaste. The way you might poke a dead dog, to see the maggots crawl. Will you understand once and for all that I don’t want to be got at, that I want to be left alone?” His skin was mottled with red and violet, his voice had risen. “Go roll in your own dung, you yellow bitch!” he shouted at her silence.

  “Calm down,” she said, still quietly, but she left him at once and went to her cabin. Of course he had been right about her motives; her question had been largely a pretext, a mere effort to interest him. But what harm in that? Did not that effort imply respect for the other? At the moment of asking the question she had felt at most a slight distrust of him; she had mostly felt sorry for him, the poor arrogant venomous bastard, Mr. No-Skin as Olleroo called him. What did he expect, the way he acted? Love?

  “I guess he can’t stand anybody feeling sorry for him,” said Olleroo, lying on the lower bunk, gilding her nipples.

  “Then he can’t form any human relationship. All his Dr. Hammergeld did was turn an autism inside out…”

  “Poor frot,” said Olleroo. “Tomiko, you don’t mind if Harfex comes in for a while tonight, do you?”

  “Can’t you go to his cabin? I’m sick of always having to sit in Main with that damned peeled turnip.”

  “You do hate him, don’t you? I guess he feels that. But I slept with Harfex last night too, and Asnanifoil might get jealous, since they share the cabin. It would be nicer here.”

  “Service them both,” Tomiko said with the coarseness of offended modesty. Her Terran subculture, the East Asian, was a puritanical one; she had been brought up chaste.

  “I only like one a night,” Olleroo replied with innocent serenity. Beldene, the Garden Planet, had never discovered chastity, or the wheel.

  “Try Osden, then,” Tomiko said. Her personal instability was seldom so plain as now: a profound self-distrust manifesting itself as destructivism. She had volunteered for this job because there was, in all probability, no use in doing it.

  The little Beldene looked up, paintbrush in hand, eyes wide. “Tomiko, that was a dirty thing to say.”

  “Why?”

  “It would be vile! I’m not attracted to Osden!”

  “I didn’t know it mattered to you,” Tomiko said indifferently, though she did know. She got some papers together and left the cabin, remarking; “I hope you and Harfex or whoever it is finish by last bell; I’m tired.”

  Olleroo was crying, tears dripping on her little gilded nipples. She wept easily. Tomiko had not wept since she was ten years old.

  It was not a happy ship; but it took a turn for the better when Asnanifoil and his computers raised World 4470. There it lay, a dark-green jewel, like truth at the bottom of a gravity well. As they watched the jade disc grow, a sense of mutuality grew among them. Osden’s selfishness, his accurate cruelty, served now to draw the others together. “Perhaps,” Mannon said, “he was sent as a beating-gron. What Terrans call a scapegoat. Perhaps his influence will be good after all.” And no one, so careful were they to be kind to one another, disagreed.

  They came into orbit. There were no lights on nightside, on the continents none of the lines and clots made by animals who build.

  “No men,” Harfex murmured.

  “Of course not,” snapped Osden, who had a viewscreen to himself, and his head inside a polythene bag. He claimed that the plastic cut down on the empathic noise he received from the others. “We’re two light centuries past the limit of the Hainish Expansion, and outside that there are no men. Anywhere. You don’t think Creation would have made the same hideous mistake twice?”

  No one was paying him much heed; they were looking with affection at that jade immensity below them, where there was life, but not human life. They were misfits among men, and what they saw there was not desolation, but peace. Even Osden did not look quite so expressionless as usual; he was frowning.

  Descent in fire on the sea; air reconnaissance; landing. A plain of something like grass, thick, green, bowing stalks, surrounded the ship, brushed against extended view cameras, smeared the lenses with a fine pollen.

  “It looks like a pure phytosphere,” Harfex said. “Osden, do you pick up anything sentient?”

  They all turned to the Sensor. He had left the screen and was pouring himself a cup of tea. He did not answer. He seldom answered spoken questions.

  The chitinous rigidity of military discipline was quite inapplicable to these teams of mad scientists; their chain of command lay somewhere between parliamentary procedure and peck-order, and would have driven a regular service officer out of his mind. By the inscrutable decision of the Authority, however, Dr. Haito Tomiko had been given the title of Coordinator, and she now exercised her prerogative for the first time. “Mr. Sensor Osden,” she said, “please answer Mr. Harfex.”

  “How could I ‘pick up’ anything from outside,” Osden said without turning, “with the emotions of nine neurotic hominids pulsating around me like worms in a can? When I have anything to tell you, I’ll tell you. I’m aware of my responsibility as Sensor. If you presume to give me an order again, however, Coordinator Haito, I’ll consider my responsibility void.”

  “Very well, Mr. Sensor. I trust no orders will be needed henceforth.” Tomiko’s bullfrog voice was calm, but Osden seemed to flinch slightly as he stood with his back to her, as if the surge of her suppressed rancor had struck him with physical force.

  The biologist’s hunch proved correct. When they began field analyses they found no animals even among the microbiota. Nobody here ate anybody else. All life-forms were photosynthesizing or saprophagous, living off light or death, not off life. Plants: infinite plants, not one species known to the visitors from the house of Man. Infinite shades and intensities of green, violet, purple, brown, red. Infinite silences. Only the wind moved, swaying leaves and fronds, a warm soughing wind laden with spores and pollens, blowing the sweet pale-green dust over prairies of great grasses, heaths that bore no heather, flowerless forests where no foot had ever walked, no eye had ever looked. A warm, sad world, sad and serene. The Surveyors wandering like picnickers over sunny plains of violet filicaliformes, spoke softly to each other. They knew their voices broke a silence of a thousand million years, the silence of wind and leaves, leaves and wind, blowing and ceasing and blowing again. They talked softly; but being human, they talked.

  “Poor old Osden,” said Jenny Chong, Bio and Tech, as she piloted a helijet on the North Polar Quadrating run. “All that fancy hi-fi stuff in his brain and nothing to receive. What a bust.”

  “He told me he hates plants,” Olleroo said with a giggle.

  “You’d think he’d like them, since they don’t bother him like we do.”

  “Can’t say I much like these plants myself,” said Porlock, looking down at the purple undulations of the North Circumpolar Forest. “All the same. No mind. No change. A man alone in it would go right off his head.”

  “But it’s all alive,” Jenny Chong said. “And if it lives, Osden hate
s it.”

  “He’s not really so bad,” Olleroo said, magnanimous.

  Porlock looked at her sidelong and asked, “You ever slept with him, Olleroo?” Olleroo burst into tears and cried, “You Terrans are obscene!”

  “No she hasn’t,” Jenny Chong said, prompt to defend. “Have you, Porlock?”

  The chemist laughed uneasily: ha, ha, ha. Flecks of spittle appeared on his mustache.

  “Osden can’t bear to be touched,” Olleroo said shakily. “I just brushed against him once by accident and he knocked me off like I was some sort of dirty…thing. We’re all just things, to him.”

  “He’s evil,” Porlock said in a strained voice, startling the two women. “He’ll end up shattering this team, sabotaging it, one way or another. Mark my words. He’s not fit to live with other people!” They landed on the North Pole. A midnight sun smoldered over low hills. Short, dry, greenish-pink bryoform grasses stretched away in every direction, which was all one direction, south. Subdued by the incredible silence, the three Surveyors set up their instruments and set to work, three viruses twitching minutely on the hide of an unmoving giant.

  Nobody asked Osden along on runs as pilot or photographer or recorder, and he never volunteered, so he seldom left base camp. He ran Harfex’s botanical taxonomic data through the onship computers, and served as assistant to Eskwana, whose job here was mainly repair and maintenance. Eskwana had begun to sleep a great deal, twenty-five hours or more out of the thirty-two-hour day, dropping off in the middle of repairing a radio or checking the guidance circuits of a helijet. The Coordinator stayed at base one day to observe. No one else was home except Poswet To, who was subject to epileptic fits; Mannon had plugged her into a therapy-circuit today in a state of preventive catatonia. Tomiko spoke reports into the storage banks, and kept an eye on Osden and Eskwana. Two hours passed.